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What makes the Kint Institute training different from other training programs?

The Kint Institute certificate program evolved out of a serendipitous gathering of faculty for a two-day trauma conference presentation several years ago. At the time, the group of presenters did not know one another, and only a few had worked together for a special issue on trauma for The Arts in Psychotherapy. And yet, what they discovered was a shared sense of what effective trauma treatment looks like and how the arts can support change, as well as a set of shared values about teaching, learning, and humanitarianism. Those shared values are the core of our training program and include the sense that people grow in safe environments where they are both held and challenged, where their clinical experience is valued, and where they feel part of a thriving community of like-minded practitioners.

When we conducted interviews for our first cohort, what applicants most spoke about was a sense of isolation in the work. Trauma, by its very nature, creates fragmentation. Therapists who treat traumatized people are often doing so in systems in which they too are exposed to elements of trauma, including a lack of institutional support, a disconnection between what they know and what they are told, and productivity goals that undercut a sense of dignity and value for therapists and patients alike. At Kint, we want to not only engage together in clinical learning, but also to provide a professional community that counteracts the qualities imbedded in unhealthy systems.

The mental health field itself continues to mirror trauma dynamics in that it remains siloed, so that therapists often spend time in professional communities in which they are only gathered with people who share their clinical approach or are from their discipline. In our program, art therapists learn alongside dance therapists, drama therapists talk about song while music therapists speak the language of theatre. Psychologists, marriage and family therapists, and social workers engage with the arts and contribute their clinical knowledge of trauma.

We teach an integrative approach that distills each creative arts therapy modality to its core elements so that students are not just learning one method, but walk away with a set of tools that they can then implement with their patients, in their own way. As such, our program is a rare integrative one that sees value in a range of arts modalities and frames these using theory and research from the wider fields of trauma, neuroscience, and attachment studies. In this sense, all our students bring something important to the table, and find they re-affirm what they already know while internalizing new knowledge.

Making a commitment to training at Kint is making a commitment to yourself and to your patients. It is an opportunity to participate in a group of talented practitioners and thinkers. And it is a chance to join a growing community at the ground level. What are you waiting for?

“At any one moment in our lives we are all in the middle of a multiplicity of stories, all of them being spun out at the same time and woven together to form its fabric.” (Fugard, 1997, p. 3)

I was 16 when I first encountered the writing of playwright Athol Fugard. I was perusing the monologue choices available for cold reading at an audition for Into the Woods and picked up one from the play My Children! My Africa! (Fugard, 1990). After performing it at the audition—for a part that ultimately went to my best friend—I sought out the script at the library. I was hungrily reading plays at this time, but hadn’t ventured beyond the canon of established American playwrights. But this singular show, a beautiful and fierce elucidation of South African apartheid told through the relationship between two teenage students (a white girl and a black boy) and the boy’s male teacher, opened up a world to me—of the consequences of government-sanctioned racism and of the potential of theatre to reach across cultures to provoke emotion in service of understanding the plight of human beings.

Fugard, a South African artist who is now 85 years old and has been writing for the better part of six decades, quickly became my “favorite” playwright. I continued to read his scripts, lectured on him in college, and maintained an interest in the politics of his country, particularly as they shifted rapidly in 1994 with the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I turned back many times to his published notebooks (Fugard, 1983), a collection of life observations that served as source material for some of his early plays. I hold a certain reverence for books, so it’s telling that this volume is the only one in my collection that is totally battered, and in which passages are furiously marked and underlined. So many of Fugard’s thoughts echoed my own life experiences despite the separation of half a world’s distance and 30 years’ time.

I eventually got to meet Fugard in 1999 following his production of The Captain’s Tiger at Manhattan Theatre Club, in which he made his last appearance as an actor in his own plays. He was entirely kind in taking the time to listen to my proclamations of how much his work meant to me, and generous in not making me feel foolish about the emotion that poured out as I fell all over myself to try to formulate words.

Most of Fugard’s plays contain no more than three characters. In their interactions, they struggle to connect across lines of color, politics, generation, or gender. Difference is always a key factor, that which causes conflict and also pushes relationships of closeness into areas of deep hurt. Fugard so often successfully captures the beauty that exists within ugliness, as his characters pursue personal missions at the expense of others (and often with the certainty that they are, in fact, doing what is right). As such, these plays are instructive about the ways that trauma can be borne out of the erasure of one person’s humanity by the force of another’s will.

It is not surprising to me that Athol Fugard’s work compelled me as an actor, but now I can clearly see how many of the lessons in his plays also inform my work as a therapist. In his writing, Fugard often functions as “a witness on behalf of the silenced” (Shelley, 2009, p. 84). By working with traumatized clients, I too have aimed to give witness to their silenced stories, but also to venture with them down the road upon which it is inevitable that they journey, sometimes painfully so. In a time of ongoing manualization of treatment that threatens to rigidify the human encounter within clinical work, it is perhaps redemptive that we turn to artists for inspiration.

Fugard never viewed his scripts as complete, nor the movements and words on the page as the performance itself, but instead saw the texts as requiring action to illuminate them. In other words, he located the potency of his art in “the line which needs the actor’s gesture to complete it” (Fugard, 1983, p. 176). And so it is with therapy, where the words traumatized people speak come alive when coupled with action that counteracts the fragility of the victim experience. By engaging with their stories, my hope is that my patients find that, while the particulars of their traumata are bounded by circumstance, the emotions are shared. Their suffering need not be shameful and isolating, but instead might be part of the greater canvas of human experience—something that can connect them to others.

As we engage with the arts in trauma treatment, we have the hope of co-creating a place where the synergy of word and action have the power to transcend circumstance. By working through them, trauma stories can perhaps be filed away, not as the singular narrative that defines a life, but as part of a larger repertoire. As such, we might find a way to hold this multiplicity of stories—both our clients’ and our own.

Seeking Refuge: The Heart and the Art of Healing for Survivors of Violence and War

I am writing this as I listen to the non-stop roar of fireworks on the 4th of July—Independence Day in the United States. Independence is a term that is often associated with freedom. Yet while many Americans celebrate freedom, many who come to the U.S. as asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants do not know freedom from fear. The June 26th decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to partially lift lower court-ordered blocks against the travel ban threatens those who hope to join their family members who are already resettled here.

I believe it is now more essential than ever that those of us working therapeutically with immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers find ways to connect that are culturally and contextually congruent. The arts have long been a universal voice for all aspects of human experience. The majority of the world is socio-centric, where more collective and integrative healing processes are commonplace. Rituals, rites of passage, celebrations, and communal gatherings often use creative processes and practices such as dance, drumming, music, storytelling, and art to support and invite healing, grieving, celebration, mourning, acknowledgement, and humanity. The creative arts provide a pathway that may be more familiar and safely engaging to our global community members who are displaced by violence and persecution.

The arts offer us avenues to give voice to a broad range of human experience—from the most unspeakable horror to the most celebrated joy—in ways that no other form of communication can. With the number of refugees and those displaced by human cruelty and environmental change steadily increasing, and the search for a place to land becoming more difficult and hostile, we need more imaginative and creative ways to connect across the seemingly pronounced divides of race, religion, ethnicity, political affiliation, gender, and socio-economic status. We need the connection, compassion, and creativity that the creative arts—the heart of our humanity—uniquely offer.